Affistash

This is the story of getting the fist paying customer!

I launched Affistash on the 15th, and in the beginning of our product, I only focused on B2C revenue, which I later realised it was a big mistake!

After the Producthunt launch, and some marketing on social networks (Reddit, TikTok, Instagram, Indiehackers, etc.), we managed to get around 70 users, but none of the users were paid, since our B2C plan was around 17$/month.

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In the end, after lots of complains about the price, I decided to take a different route for Affistash. I decided to make the platform free, but with limitations, and I also made a pro plan, that only costed 1$. Instead, I would make the revenue from companies getting listed on the platform in order to get more marketers in their program.

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This turned out to be a great decision, since 2 people subscribed after the first promotional email on the 18th of December, and the same week, we got our first business to buy a placement on the platform.

Since me and my co-founder are both technical founders, it was pretty easy for us to build a quick landing page (affistash.com) and also a demo (app.affistash.com) that we could pitch to our potential customers.

So for the next 10 days, we spent every day sending emails, DMs and scheduling calls (I was mainly on LinkedIn and Discord, while my partner was on Reddit and Facebook) with our potential customers, but also with Affiliate Marketing Managers, from big companies to see if our tool could work both ways.

To my surprise, everything went really great, we converted around 10-15% of the cold messages that we sent into calls, and we had 2 people willing to pay for the pre-sale. The feedback was great and we even had some people from reddit saying "it's too good to be true" xD

Currently, we are working on a polished version of our demo, with a backend implemented to it, it should be fairly easy to develop, so I expect it to be fully finished in around 2 weeks. After that, the biggest challenge will be ahead of us, marketing & sales, an area I am not so experienced in...anyway, I'm looking forward to it, so if you guys have any suggestions in that direction, I would love to hear them!

Around that time, I was really deep into Jordan Welch's content on Youtube, and I actually noticed that he had a really successful SaaS business called Viral Vault. Jordan mentioned multiple times that this tool makes him around $90k MRR, but since he has a huge audience, and most of them are also potential customers, it made 100% sense.

Since his niche for this startup was eCommerce, which is a really popular online business model, I started to think if something similar could be built for other online business models that are really big in the mainstream.

With that in mind, I thought that a great niche would be affiliate marketing. With no other competitor on the market, I think we should have a pretty good chance to succeed!